There's a scene in the movie The Big Chill where Jeff Goldblum's character announces that he's going to open a club in New York. "Like Elaine's," he says. "But hipper. Elaine's is dead."
At the time of the movie's release, in 1983, this assessment wasn't far from the truth. When I went on board as a bartender a few years later, the fabled Upper East Side establishment barely had a pulse. For 20 years—from the days of Dorothy Kilgallen and Earl Wilson bylines in the early '60s through the early '80s, when it appeared on the cover of New York magazine—the restaurant had been a gossip-column staple. But night after night I stood behind an empty bar. And night after night owner Elaine Kaufman sat alone at Table 4—a decade earlier an Algonquin-style gathering place for writers and artists from all over. She watched the door like a faithful collie waiting for its master to come home. But the door rarely opened. And every night at two or three in the morning, one of the waiters would fetch her shawl from the back room, and Elaine would turn to me and shrug, offering any number of excuses: It was too hot or too cold. It was tax season or the Jewish holidays. "Tomorrow will be better," she'd say as she passed me on her way out the door.
Those years in the desert weren't particularly good for my wallet, but they did afford me a chance to get to know the woman behind what was once—and is again today—among the hottest restaurants this country has ever known.
And did she have stories. There was the one about the night in 1964 when Jackie Kennedy came knocking at the door well past closing time. Elaine had been sitting around swapping tales with Frank Conroy, Nelson Aldrich, and Jack Richardson when the bartender called over to tell her Mrs. Kennedy was outside. Elaine laughed, thinking he was joking, but then she looked over and saw Jackie, "dressed in a gold Chanel suit with a starburst brooch," waiting on the sidewalk with Leonard Bernstein, Susan Sontag, Adolph Green, Betty Comden, and George Plimpton, among others. "I think it was her first night out after mourning," Elaine told me. "She put some money in the jukebox and the bunch of them danced for hours."
Then there was the time Imelda Marcos showed up with a squadron of armed guards. (Sharpshooters, Elaine said, were positioned on the roof.) And the night Rudolf Nureyev arrived directly from the airport, having just touched down in the United States.
Remarkably, Elaine recounted all of this stuff without a trace of melancholy. Not for a single moment—even as those dead months stretched into years—did she consider that her time at the top might be over. She always believed she'd be back.
The word on the street in those days was that the food was to blame. While early reviews had been mostly favorable (James Beard had written that the fare at Elaine's was "good and wholesome"), as the years passed, critics began calling it mediocre at best, dreadful at worst. And each time another scathing evaluation came out, Elaine would descend into a dark funk. But anybody will tell you that Elaine's has never been about the food. It's the energy of the place—and the outsize personality of its proprietor—that draw the crowds.
There's no denying that Elaine Kaufman is a force to be reckoned with. She's a large woman with an encyclopedic mind that jumps from one subject to another and a temperament not well suited to suffering fools. Her conversational style tends toward jumbled non sequiturs, yet she gets annoyed with anybody who fails to keep up. I remember one night when Elaine started telling me something about Argentina. At first I thought she was talking about a new wine she'd added to the list. But then she mentioned something about the Nazis, and I knew she'd lost me. I looked to a waiter for help, but he just shrugged and slunk away. It turned out Elaine was talking about the famous Nazi hunter Peter Malkin, who'd been in the restaurant the night before. "Don't you read?" she demanded angrily before stomping off.
And lowly bartenders weren't her only targets. Though she's developed a reputation for kowtowing to the rich and famous, Elaine takes great pleasure in skewering inflated egos. I once heard her tell television star Chris Noth that he wouldn't know a real actor if he fell over one. When an aging movie starlet ordered a salad and a glass of water for dinner one night, explaining that she had to keep an eye on her figure, Elaine shot back, "You're the only one who does."
But the best story was the one about Norman Mailer. He'd come into the restaurant with a very young date who, Elaine said, was "on a power trip" because of the company she was keeping. At first the girl expressed displeasure about the table the couple had been given. Then she began to grouse about the service. Finally she called Elaine over to complain about the food. Now Elaine lets a lot of things roll off her back. (I once heard her shrug off a drunken woman who'd called her "a fat pig" with the retort, "Oh, that takes imagination.") But she will not stand for criticism of her food. "Listen, sweetheart," she said, looking at the young woman but cocking her head toward Mailer. "Him I have to take it from, but no half-a-hooker is going to tell me what to do." The writer stormed out in a huff, date in tow, and the following day Elaine received an angry handwritten letter from him. After reading the first few lines, she took a black magic marker and scrawled "BORING, BORING, BORING" in large block letters across every page. Then she sent the letter back.
Elaine Kaufman was born on the Upper West Side and grew up in Jamaica, Queens, where her father, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, ran a dry-goods store. In grammar school, Elaine says, instead of paying attention to her teachers, she would read the Daily News, which she used to keep hidden under her desk. She started working when she was 14, taking a job in a collectible stamps and magazines store in the theater district, and discovered immediately that she was a natural when it came to sales. When a customer asked to see a stamp, Elaine would place it on the back of her hand and display it as if it were a full-carat diamond.
A few years after graduating from high school, she started waitressing at a small place up in East Harlem. "That's where I learned the business," she says. It was also where she learned that she and the business were a perfect fit. "I said, 'Wow, here's an easy way to make money.'"
In 1961, Elaine took a waitressing job at Portofino, on Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. At the time, Bob Dylan was playing the coffeehouses, the Beat movement was in full vogue, and the Village was a vibrant place to be. It wasn't long before Elaine's quick wit and ribald language had earned her a reputation as something of a local character. After a few years, though—and a devastating romance with the restaurant's chef and owner—she decided it was time to move on. She set out in search of a place of her own and eventually found one in the far reaches of the Upper East Side, in what was known as Yorkville, then among the bluest of blue-collar neighborhoods. Everyone told her she was crazy to move so far from the action. (Years later, when Elaine's began to get attention, New York columnist Rex Reed wrote that he couldn't understand how anyone could afford the cab ride that far uptown.) But the place was clean and the price was right. And in April of 1963, Elaine opened her doors for business.
Almost from the start, she proved the naysayers wrong. Elaine's developed a solid base of regulars who didn't mind splurging to get to what so many considered the edge of the universe. Part of the allure was that having enough money to pay the check was never a problem at Elaine's. Stories of the way she'd carry tabs for those early customers are legendary. "I could go to Elaine's and spend like a rich Arab," recalled the playwright Larry L. King, "even though my telephone had been cut off back home."
The first time Elaine met the writer Hunter S. Thompson, then little known, he asked if he could cash a hundred-dollar check, using the writer Warren Hinckle, who'd accumulated quite a tab himself, as a reference. "If you're a friend of Warren's," Elaine told him, "that's good enough for me."
Running tabs for patrons with suspect means of support—and cashing checks that tended toward the elastic—may not have seemed like the best way to build a business, but Elaine apparently knew what she was doing. Within a few years, most of her "dependents" were well on their way to bright writing careers. Tabs were paid, and Elaine's became known as the city's quintessential literary salon.
As the '70s approached, though, the crowd began to change. In a story that ran in New York magazine, A. E. Hotchner described the restaurant's young stable of writers as "pilot fish…that, true to their name, lead other fish into their waters, namely sharks and barracudas."
In other words, Hollywood showed up. And with the movie stars, producers, and directors came an avalanche of celebrity-fueled press. Once known only among an intimate circle, Elaine's became one of the hottest restaurants in the world. It turned up in more than a dozen movies. The beginning of Woody Allen's landmark film Manhattan includes a shot of the restaurant's front window filling the screen. (It was during these years that Allen made Elaine's his home, eating there three, four, even five times a week.) Faye Dunaway and William Holden have dinner together at Elaine's in Sidney Lumet's Network; Richard Benjamin does a scene there in Diary of a Mad Housewife; and Elaine's appears in scenes in Author! Author!, The Odd Couple, and several others. (Elaine herself had a bit part in William Friedkin's 1970 film, The Boys in the Band.)
Hollywood romance also blossomed at Elaine's. In the late '60s, Judy Garland hung out at a back table with her young accompanist and music composer, Peter Allen, and her daughter Liza, who'd recently met in London. Some years later, Mia Farrow was introduced to Woody Allen there. Even Elaine found a husband—an Englishman who worked as a sommelier at the Helmsley Hotel. (The marriage lasted only a few months and ended in a bitter divorce. Decades later, when somebody came in to notify Elaine of her ex-husband's passing, she told me to fetch a bottle of Cristal Champagne and pour glasses all around.)
By the late 1970s, the restaurant's popularity had begun to take its toll. The press continued to trash the food, and increasingly Elaine herself became the target of their barbs. A picture of her threatening one of the paparazzi with a garbage-can lid appeared in newspapers across the country, and one of the Manhattan dailies included her on a list of "dragon ladies" of the city. She earned a reputation for catering to the rich and famous and leaving the common folk standing around while empty tables along "the line," the restaurant's most prestigious area, lay in wait for the in crowd. Eventually she expanded the place, building a back room, which was quickly dubbed Siberia, and further cementing her reputation as a snob. "It wasn't easy," Elaine says of those days. "They lined up to take shots at me."
The crowds began to thin out, and by the mid-'80s, when I got there, Elaine's was pretty much over. "The once queen of New York's glitterati has practically slipped out of sight," announced one of the local tabloids at the time.
It would be years before things started to look up again. In July of 1992, the Democratic party held its presidential convention in New York, and the event marked the comeback Elaine had been waiting for. In the years just prior, the restaurant had slowly begun to show some life. Young editors from New York and Rolling Stone started frequenting the bar, and writers from The New York Post and the Daily News followed. It wasn't quite the illustrious club it had been in the '60s, but it appeared that history might repeat itself.
The week of the convention, Elaine's was full of journalists of every stripe, and celebrity boosters jammed the tables. I can remember the humid night Bill Clinton was nominated as the party's candidate. The city had decided to repave Second Avenue, and even though limousines and taxis had to drop the patrons off blocks away, the joint was completely packed. At one point I looked out the window as a large yellow machine with flashing lights crawled past, spreading new tar on the road. Steam rose from the street and men in yellow vulcanized suits with hoods and goggles walked alongside the hulking mass in a scene straight out of The Terminator. As I watched, a large, muscular man emerged from the vapors and approached the door. Sure enough, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, coming to join the revelers. I remember thinking then that the Terminator and Elaine—who was sitting at Table 4, surrounded by power brokers and the press—had at least one thing in common: Neither of them can be killed.
Today Elaine's is back on top, with the phone ringing off the hook and tables as hard to get as they were back in the glory days. The funny thing is, for all the hype surrounding the place, Elaine still runs it like a corner candy store. When I stopped by to visit on a recent afternoon, everything was just as I'd remembered it. The old National register sat on the back bar, where that night the cashier would record every check by hand, and Elaine sat perched on a stool in her gaudy dress and sparkly shoes, her short legs dangling inches from the floor.
And as sunlight coursed through the windows, bathing the Spanish-tile floor and the frescoed walls lined with the books of her famous clientele, I thought about the days when she'd sit there and meet her purveyors one by one. The hippie vegetable man, the butcher with a leg of veal slung over his shoulder, the fishmonger, the dessert lady—as each one approached, she would push her thick-rimmed glasses to her forehead and lower her freckle-flecked face to scrutinize their wares. Then she'd dip her hand into the black pocketbook she kept on the stool beside her and pull out a wad of bills. "All I ever wanted," she told me that afternoon, "was to run a nice little restaurant."
Elaine's
1703 Second Avenue
New York, New York
212-534-8103